Change is never easy, and that is particularly true in government. When it comes to collaboration, it is the intelligence community that has been evolving and testing its own boundaries.

To understand how and why, we have to go back to September 11, 2001. One reason for the terrorists’ success was the many missed signs of their imminent attacks. That failure was followed by intelligence issues in Iraq and incorrect findings about weapons of mass destruction. Other examples exist, but those two events spurred a core question: “Is there a better way for us to collect, process and disseminate intelligence data?”

This column was actually complex to write because, as we have been reporting, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has actually shut down some parts of the Intellipedia suite of collaboration tools. Read more here: